Abstract
This work presents the second part of Epistemology of the Mathematics Professor; the international phase research analysis, which data were collected in Peru, Chile, and Uruguay from mathematics teachers. The objective is to identify in teachers the epistemological conceptions that underlie the teaching of Mathematics and investigate if these conceptions are equivalent to those found in Brazil: empiricists (substantiated sometimes by apriorists), and, rarely, constructivists. The general research objective will be pursued, in this text, by the specific objective: to know in which stage of human childhood teachers place the emergence of the necessary mathematical notions for the child to perform basic mathematical operations; and to what they attribute its genesis. For this, we analyze the answers to research questions 4 to 8, asked to teachers of all levels of education, through interviews. The responses given are similar to those of Brazilian teachers in relation to the predominance of empiricist conceptions founded by apriorist ones. Constructivist conceptions are found in only one of the seventeen research interviews. Teachers believe in the early appearance of basic mathematical notions, attributing them to environment pressure, through stimulation and repetition, configuring an empiricist conception; and, frequently, to genetic inheritance or maturation, configuring an apriorism, even innate. They confuse logical constructions, performed by the child from birth to about 7 or 8 years of age, with basic mathematical notions. They attribute its appearance to stimulation (based on maturation), with a devaluation of the subject’s action and of their cognitive development process; they attribute to perception what is the merit of action and the coordination of the subject’s actions within the process of reflecting abstraction. Teachers consider, therefore, the teaching process to be hegemonic over the learning process. The basic theoretical reference is Piaget’s Genetic Epistemology.
Keywords:
Construction of Mathematical Knowledge; Epistemology of the Mathematics Teacher; Genesis of elementary mathematical notions